Literacy What is Its Value?

My definition of literacy and how valuable it is differs slightly from Oxford’s definition.

Oxford’s dictionary defines the word literacy as the ability to read and write. A literate person has a competence or vast knowledge in certain areas or subjects such as computer knowledge, poverty issues or politics and is able to read and write.

Personally as a mature First Nations woman traditional values play a major role in my life. Most of my educational training has come from both hands on teaching, and an oral history, with minimal written back ground. I never gave written literacy much attention while I was attending school during my early years. My inability to write at an age appropriate level in accordance to a race that is not my own exposes my weakness in my inability to perform well in both cultures.

Over the past several years I had developed a safety mechanism to compensate for this inability and to protect myself from becoming both the teachers’ and other kids’ targets. That mechanism was to memorize anything and everything that the people in my realm could and would send my way. I did this through songs, poetry and repetitive action games.

What does literacy mean to me personal?

For me being literate means the difference as to whether my family can eat and pay all of the rent at the same time. Weather or not I can get another job or not.
Literacy also helps determines how the rest of the world will value me and where I will fit in society’s class ism.

In my case it means one more hurdle in life for me to overcome.

It means that I will have to learn to speak and write a new way.
It is like a new language full of complicated words. Each word’s meaning representation and strength.

I over came these barriers by memorizing the basics which were enough to get me through to grade eleven. Then I dropped out two weeks before the end of the school year.
When I was in grade three learned to focus in on memorizing anything and everything. I still remember three and a half decades later I still remember the word that I spelled out loud and the spontaneous cheers that came from my classmates. The word was “Adventure” which is what learning about literacy have been all about it me.

Unfortunately I could not use this same strategy when it came to being able to write.
For the two decades that followed my departure from school I ended up living on the streets and working in a huge variety of labors dead end jobs. I never linked my poor literacy skills to my work skills. In fact the only time that I thought about it was when I was out of work and having to apply for work or re-apply for income assistance.

Things have started to change for me. I am seeing and starting to understand the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything that I have been speaking about around human rights issues and about the eradication of our own social problems, such poverty, racism and class ism; are starting to move forward shedding a different light on how we can solve our these problems.

Confirmation of what I thought was a weak connection came in early November. When I had the opportunity to attend the Premier’s Literacy Summit at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

In attendance at this summit were over one hundred and seventy educators and elected government officials.

I saw this as a window of opportunity to educate the educators about the struggles that I and thousands of other people are going through trying to get an education. I greeted these people with a huge hesitation because of my past experience with these types of people. I saw and heard more then just their own pleas for more funding. I saw that a majority of these people were not there to represent you or me. They were there to represent the private sector that usually represents the corporations who I see as our major oppressors.

When our provincial premier announced that he was releasing $55 million dollars to Literacy programs services in British Columbia most of the attendees where pleased.

The premier’s proposal was that he would release $12 million within the next six months to public libraries and an additional $43 million before the 2010 Olympics.

He also introduced a new Literacy Panel, whose members were already pre-selected, consisted of all business and career orientated white middle age people with the exception of one young First Nations woman.
Not one of them said that they were not currently in school nor did they have an immediate family member that was accessing the public school services. According to them every one of them had no disabilities and all their friends could read and write and had no problems accessing school services or funding.

The things that disturbed me about this summit was that short notice everyone received, not knowing where the money came from. Then there was the fact that the premier had already selected the Literacy panel without consulting the educators. He wants everyone in BC to be literate by 2010. In the mean time he is taking some of our most basics needs from us. He has only set aside $55mil for the next eight years. This is supposed to eliminate the 40% illiteracy problems that the province has.

I personally think that the government has the finance books up side down or maybe they are reading the books back wards. Or maybe they are illiterate themselves but are in denial about it.

Right now they are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the Olympics over the next ten years, lowering the minimum wage to six dollars an hour, reducing the working age to twelve years of age and firing thousands of career trained men and women who have worked within the government. These are the people who are the back bone of our society who are fighting not only for their jobs but for yours and my well being and our children’s future

I think the cure for BC alarming literacy problems is;
· We and government should invest in anyone who wants to enhance the educational skills.
· We as a community and our government should foster these people desires.

So if our government was to take the same amount of dollars that they are investing in the Olympics then maybe we can eliminate the literacy problems and get poverty under control. Once we get our poverty under control then we as society will experience living through the rippling effects of seeing less premature deaths because we will be in better health because we will be able to feed ourselves.